This specification relates to digital information retrieval and presentation.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources such as video or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search system can identify resources in response to a text search query that includes one or more search phrases (i.e., one or more words). The search system ranks the resources based on measures of relevance of the resources to the search query and on measures of quality of the resources. In turn, the search system selects a quantity of the ranked resources and provides search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered for viewing according to the rank of the resource to which the search result links, and provided in a search results page.
The search results page displays a list of search results, and each search result includes several lines of text (a “snippet”) that are intended to show how the resource to which the search result links is relevant to the query. However, this snippet of text may not provide the user with enough information for the user to determine whether the resource referenced by the search result provides data that the user prefers. Thus, the user may need to click on multiple search results and scroll through or search the web pages (or other resources) that are linked to by the search results in order to find data that is formatted in the manner that the user prefers.